Séamus McGrath (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)

I thank Mr. Taaffe and Ms Leech for taking the time to come into us. I am someone who spent many years on council in Cork. I have the utmost respect for councils and the work they do. They are on the front line in the housing crisis that we have.

I have great respect for the work being done. I want to focus on operational issues and touch on what was focused on in the opening address on how we can unlock supply to a greater extent. Mr. Taaffe mentioned some of the key issues around land zoning, infrastructure and so on. I will start with operational issues. We had a debate last week in the Dáil on the vacancy rates, the voids and the length of time it takes to turn around vacant housing in local authorities. This is a problem across the country, although it varies depending on the local authority. How is there such a variance across the board? Some local authorities can turn around houses quite quickly while others take much longer. We had statistics on that from some of the debates last week. I am not saying that things are perfect in how the Department and the system is run, but why can some local authorities do better than others? Nothing frustrates and annoys people more than seeing houses empty when we are in the depths of a housing crisis. I would like to get feedback, opinions and suggestion on this from the witnesses on how we can improve this across the board. We need to try to remove some of the anomalies that exist between different local authorities in how they approach this issue.

On housing supply, I want to tease out some of the CCMA's suggestions regarding what is necessary. I agree with much of it in terms of additional zoned land. Thankfully, plans are afoot to do that. Regarding local authorities, does Mr. Taaffe feel they are ready to take on the challenge of opening up the development plans and targeting some key areas for extra housing? Notwithstanding what was said about the infrastructure deficit, does the CCMA believe that there is land that can be developed, subject to zoning? In other words, that it is serviced, deliverable and is land that can be developed. The simple question here is whether additional zoning will assist in making land available. Is there land that can be zoned and is serviced? That is the point I am trying to get to.

The three major utilities, water, wastewater and energy were mentioned. Will the witnesses quantify for us how much of an issue they believe these are? To what extent are these causing difficulties for increasing the supply of housing? This is one of the issues we regularly hear. Again, I am asking for the CCMA's suggestions on what can be done in this area. It cannot be all about money; it has to be about how we manage the resources we have and how we prioritise the utilisation of those resources. The spend from Uisce Éireann, for example, has to be targeted at making land developable for large-scale developments. There is a body of work to be done there and I would like to get the witnesses' opinions on that.

I know my clock is ticking here. One issue I really want to focus on is affordable housing. We have seen great strides being made on social housing, albeit not enough. However, there is a huge variance in delivery between social housing and affordable housing. Mr. Taaffe outlined the figures in his opening statement. The Department needs to address this in its new housing strategy. With the local authorities, I sometimes feel that social housing is maybe the easier option to go with when a developer comes knocking and says that they have a development with permission in place and they want the local authority to sign up to a turnkey development. The default position seems to be social housing. This needs to change. There needs to be a greater balance between social housing and affordable housing. At present we are ignoring that cohort of people who are working, and who are above the social housing income limits but are not in a position to acquire a property in their own right. There is a large cohort of people, both couples and individuals, in this position. The system is not providing assistance to them. Affordable housing is the one avenue to do so. The question is how do we make that happen and what role can the local authorities play. I know I have used up some of my time. I will give the witnesses a chance to respond and maybe I will have the opportunity to come back in. This is my first time doing this so I am not sure how it all works. I would appreciate it if the witnesses were to try to address some of the points I have raised and some of the questions I have asked.